How Do You Properly Conduct Preventive Maintenance?

The prevention and correction of possible failures in equipment helps to avoid unnecessary damages and interruptions to your operations. This article will explain to you what preventive maintenance is and how to correctly implement it into your business.

Planning is one of the biggest advantages associated with preventive maintenance and companies often notice a substantial improvement in their business operations once they successfully implement preventive maintenance measures. Increased productivity, reduced reparation costs and less time spent in responding to and resolving failures are just some of the benefits associated with preventive maintenance. Conversely, corrective and unplanned interventions, although necessary in certain cases, may have several (direct and indirect) costs that could be avoided with better planning.

Planning repairs and monitoring equipment is often the most apt way to prevent disruption to activities and, ultimately, avoid situations of customer discomfort or dissatisfaction. It is an effective method for companies to control the entirety of their operation and equipment without having to pause activity or pay for costly replacements of devices.

How do I Plan Preventive Maintenance?

1. Choose the right people

Before starting to write your Preventive Maintenance Plan, it is important to have the right people at hand to implement it. It is important that you have a qualified team of technicians that is capable of solving problems of any nature that may surface over time as it should be down to these members of staff too monitor and report on the majority of failures. It is also important to ensure that your team interact well as communication and feedback between the team are also important for maintenance projects.

2. Create organised work plans

Your team be able to select the pieces of equipment which would benefit from preventive maintenance and separate them from those to which it would be nonsensical to apply such measures. These will tend to be assets that are integral to the core business model and which would have a particularly high reparation cost in the event of failure.

Maintenance management software providers such as Infraspeak may prove to be very helpful when managing your assets and creating work plans. These platforms will have the ability to log and register key information of equipment including the model, serial number, specifications, uses, category in a one space, as well allowing you to organise your assets by location, supplier or technician.

3. Clearly define your goals

The information that you gather on assets will be the main reference for working out tracking costs and for determining if/when equipment needs to be repaired or replaced. to know more about how to go about doing this, read our material about risk assessment in maintenance. It is therefore worthwhile spending the time noting down the condition of your equipment when you begin monitoring your assets to help establish and classify the importance it holds to your operations. For more information on how to go about doing this, read more of our content focusing on risk assessment in maintenance.

Preventive maintenance requires a clear definition of goals and KPIs with regards to work plans, which must be regularly consulted and analysed. The manager should also follow up on the regularity of these consultations and how well the goals comply with standards.

All preventive interventions should be as the result of rigorous planning. All stages of implementation should be clearly laid out and should consider the materials, number of hours and even specialist external services that may be required. This is all geared towards avoiding unforeseen complications as best as possible.

4. Organise your operations

Preventive interventions require many documents such as spreadsheets, equipment lists, implementation reports and reading to be in perfect order. To simplify this work, these documents could be generated with the support of maintenance management software.

In preventive maintenance, the steps of an intervention should always be carried out according to a schedule and/or according to results from data collected from operation indices. The review period, for example, will be based on historical or manufacturer recommendations.

In addition to systematic equipment reviews, preventive maintenance includes the periodic lubrication of equipment, inspection plans, calibration plans among other points that will depend on the type and status of the asset.

5. Track in real-time

For preventive maintenance models to be a success, you must create detailed plans based on active interventions. Software solutions like Infraspeak allow managers to track staff members’ performance and execution of tasks in real-time and to better understand what and where needs to be changed.